Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund: Daisuke Yokota Exhibition at Foam

by UnseenMay 15 2014

Unseen is proud to announce the opening of Daisuke Yokota's (1983, Japan) exhibition, Site/Cloud, at photography museum Foam. Yokota is the first recipient of the Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund and will therefore have his first solo exhibition in the Netherlands at Foam from 16 May to 6 July 2014. In Site/Cloud, Yokota presents fresh, multi-layered work in which the materiality of photography dominates.

Founded in 2013, the Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund is a unique partnership between Unseen and Outset Netherlands, providing a new institutional platform for emerging talent. Scouting the fair before opening hours, a selection committee of young curators selects one artist exhibiting at Unseen for a solo exhibition at Foam. Last year, the selection committee consisted of Sophie von Olfers (1979, Frankfurt), Nathanja van Dijk (1984, Amsterdam) and Orit Bulgaru (1978, Tel Aviv).

In the exhibition, Site/Cloud, endless repetitions take the work further and further away from the original image as a result of Yokota's time presuming work ethics. He uses a combination of digital photography and traditional film to shoot and re-shoot images, which he then manipulates further using other techniques such as photocopying and Photoshop. He has set up an improvised darkroom in his apartment where he can freely experiment with analogue techniques and chemical processes, where chance is also allowed to leave its traces on the final image.

Partly inspired by electronic musicians such as Aphex Twin - he takes the same ideas of echo, delay and reverberation that influence the sense of time in their music – his work results into uncanny figures and an indefinable world which evoke timelessness.

Daisuke Yokota graduated from the Nippon Photography Institute in 2003. He was an honourable mention of the 31st Canon New Cosmos of Photography in 2008 and the grand prix winner of the 1_Wall Award. He has had several solo and group exhibitions, is a member of the international artist collective AM projects, and was represented at Unseen Photo Fair 2013 by G/P Gallery and will be again in 2014. Last year, Yokota was selected as a Foam Talent by international photography magazine Foam Magazine, and demonstrated the process used in his recent photobook, Untitled, published by GOLIGA, as part of the Unseen festival programme.